There are many ways to approach the subject of public space: the threats
posed to it by surveillance and visual pollution; the joys it offers
of stimulation and excitement, of anonymity and transformation; its
importance to urban variety or democratic politics. But public space
remains an evanescent and multidimensional concept that too often
escapes scrutiny.

The essays in Rites of Way: The Politics and Poetics of Public
Space open up multiple dimensions of the concept from architectural,
political, philosophical, and technological points of view. There
is some historical analysis here, but the contributors are more focused
on the future of public space under conditions of growing urbanization
and democratic confusion. The added interest offered by non-academic
work—visual art, fiction, poetry, and drama—is in part
an admission that this is a topic too important to be left only to
theorists. It also makes an implicit argument for the crucial role
that art, not just public art, plays in a thriving public realm.

Throughout this work contributors are guided by the conviction, not
pious but steely, that healthy public space is one of the best, living
parts of a just society. The paths of desire we follow in public trace
and speak our convictions and needs, our interests and foibles. They
are the vectors and walkways of the social, the public dimension of
life lying at the heart of all politics.

Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University
of Toronto and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.
He is the author of eleven books of political and cultural theory,
including most recently, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the
City (2008) and Opening Gambits: Essays on Art and Philosophy
(2008). He is the recipient of the Spitz Prize in political theory,
National Magazine Awards for both essays and columns, and in 2000
was awarded an honorary DFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art &
Design for contributions to theory and criticism.

Patrick Turmel is an assistant professor of philosophy at Université
Laval. His main research interests are in moral and political philosophy.
He has published articles in ethics and on issues pertaining to cities
and justice. He is also co-editor of Penser les institutions
(Presses de l’Université Laval).

Reviews

“The collection soon departs from its foundation in urbanism and
takes a provokative, interdisciplinary turn, offering work by a
rich assortment of voices, including a political theorist on
subversive public spaces conducive to play and social
deliberation as work, by a philosopher on how the city is public
by definition, a novelist on characters struggling with a city’s
overlapping physical and social conventions, a new-media artist
on the transformative effect of street festivals, and an art
historian on the resurgence of outdoor art. Lisa Robertson’s
blending of poetry, urban geography, social history, and the arts
in her excerpt, ‘Seven Walks from the Office for Soft
Architecture,’ provides a fitting conclusion to a collection that
will prove of interest to anyone concerned with what she calls
the ‘spiritual domain’as much the land stretching out from
our persons, as our immediate surroundings that contain the
mutable threshold between within and without (170). It is up to
us to rap on the glass.”

— Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

“To most familiar issues of public space and its fate, this
collection brings insights that should be fatal to naive
assumptions.”

— Jon Spayde, Public Art Review

“Containing fiction and visual art in addition to more
conventional essays, this book is a lively discussion of the role
that public spaces play—or could play—in modern cities.”